Planting seeds

Eric Nyquist

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Where should new EV chargers go?
When people think of buying an electric car, one concern comes up again and again: Will long road trips be punctuated by stressful searches for the next charging point? Though the vast majority of charging sessions will be at their own homes, the ability to charge on the road “really matters for people’s perceptions of whether EV makes sense for them,” says Kenneth Gillingham, a professor of economics at the School of the Environment.

With two years of YPS funding, Gillingham and his collaborators have analyzed reams of data about Connecticut drivers’ habits. “We wanted to know: If people were going from one town to another, like from New Haven to Hartford, would you need a charging station along the way?” he says. They also hired a data scientist who worked with the Connecticut Department of Transportation to learn how policymakers thought about the problem of EV uptake, which is critical for reducing transportation emissions. Now, the researchers are working on algorithms that can draw on what they’ve learned to optimize where charging stations should go, which turns out to be quite a complex mathematical problem.

Although the team’s results will be specific to Connecticut, their approach could be used by any state that wants to boost adoption of EVs. At the moment, there are still many stretches of the United States where if a charging station is down, it could be a big headache for someone on an EV road trip.

“I have to plan in a way that I didn’t have to plan with my gasoline vehicle,” says Gillingham, who owns an EV himself. “At some point, we need to get to a point where you don’t have to plan.”